Impact of Blockchain Applications on Trust in Business

Abstract

Blockchain applications are considered as “trustless” machines, because they reduce business’s needs of trust in others. The “trustless” nature draws researchers’ attention on investigating the implications of blockchain in a business environment. From a view of business ethics, this paper aims at evaluating the impacts of blockchain applications on trust and business. After expounding the relations between trust in blockchain and trust in business partners, I evaluate the impacts based on a framework of competence trust, contractual trust, and goodwill trust. My conclusion is that full acceptance of trust in blockchain over trust in others is not good and will cause several risks that cannot be neglected. The main contribution of this paper is investigating and summarizing ethical and commercial risks of blockchain applications including disintermediation fallacy, centralization of trust, ambiguous contract, noncognitive trust in untrustworthy partners, and more actions guided by moral minimum.